Sleep, substances, stuff

Sleepiness feels a lot like getting high. Not so much with the euphoria or itchiness, but there’s that opiate cotton-wool feeling, all wrapped-up, warm and fuzzy. I wonder if that feeling was a big reason for my opiate use. Everything has a function. Sleep is common to pretty much every animal, and the kind of sleep that humans have, with the cycles of R.E.M. is common to pretty much every mammal. It’s important in some deep – though poorly understood – way. Humans sleep about a third of each day and being vulnerable for that long requires a really good reason or it’d have evolved out. But what’s the purpose of the sleepiness before-hand? This state of lowered awareness and reaction? How come this hasn’t evolved out? What makes it so important? What does it provide for me now that the lack of it did not?

I haven’t got high for quite a while now and the last time was to make some dental pain go away. Which doesn’t make it legitimate or terribly sensible, but it’s not the same as getting high to feel better about my life. I didn’t want to mention this at the time, but I tripped three weeks ago. It’s not something I expect anyone to approve of – mentally ill people and hallucinogenic drugs is not typically a good combination – but it’s something I find worthwhile (and enjoyable, but I have strange ideas about what’s enjoyable). Since it’s only once or twice a year, I doubt it could be classed as problematic (and actually I think it’s good for me).

In other news, I shared a reasonable level of personal detail with another person the other day. It’s something my therapist and I talked about under the general topic of making friends. It wasn’t a conscious decision really, just something that happened in the course of conversation. Today I cleaned up my flat, which I hadn’t done for a while. I kind of got off track after I got a bad cold a month or so ago. I think that you probably have to learn how to deal with these things as you go along. But my flat was just untidy and it didn’t take long to clean up. I’d kept up with the important stuff which would have slid by before. And once it got to a point where it was annoying me, I recognised that it needed cleaning and did so, instead of letting it all seem overwhelming. Like I said, it’s a learning process. It took me a while to get back into regular guitar practice, too.